NEOLOGISTICS (Gallery text)

It is evident that languages mutate over time. If we take a historical retrospective of any of them, it is plausible to detect that changes occurred periodically and irregularly over the years, decades, and, with more prominence, centuries. These changes naturally continue in the present; sometimes they emerge in response to new expressive needs, and other times, out of caprice. They can even manifest as morphological changes that allow for loanwords, but generally, they operate as phenomena that are newly incorporated into a specific situated context. However, as they move away from the unfamiliarity of the unprecedented, they are recognized as qualities that seem inherent or self-existing, as if they had arisen by spontaneous generation. The notion of their origin is lost, or it is completely unknown, even if there is no awareness of it.

Like any language, Lulú's work is inseparable from the notion of time, as it approaches it in multiple ways. For several years now, it has been possible to detect in her production a deep exploration of temporality in various senses. Indeed, Lulú visits the past both through the themes she chooses and in relation to the language of printmaking. However, and as a sign of the times, it is possible to recognize in many practices of contemporary art a recurring approach to this abstract and complex concept that inhabits the everyday lives of people in a world governed by capitalism. Certainly, Lulú investigates specific aspects of printmaking and its history, which is why she travels back and forth in time like an inter-spatial traveler, exploring the past in constellation with the present, referring, on one hand, to graphic images dating back to medieval times, but which are also currently represented on breakfast tablecloths or on the tiles of floors and walls.

In this regard, the prints on sewing pattern paper —as units with physical properties and autonomous significations— can symbolically transform into many things: bricks, scales, or crystal-shaped pendalogues to achieve, together, another meaningful unit. Something like fractals intervene in space and raise questions about their own conditions of existence. Each print is different from the other, but together they compose a self-supporting ornamental structure because the artwork itself is its own structure.

On the other hand, Lulú's prints seem to question the postulates of a world that strives to erase the line of our vulnerability, as they take shape through their inscription on an undulating material like paper, whose characteristics exacerbate the sense of fragility, transparency, and lightness, but above all, ephemerality. At the same time, the question arises regarding the emptiness that exists between them: are there missing images or do they respond to the unrepresentable or unspeakable? The prints reveal but also conceal, traversing a range that extends from the valorization of the everyday and the minimal to the major discussions aroused by the classical disciplinary techniques of the arts circumscribed in the present. In these types of processes, the arts discuss some of the foundations that articulate possible discourses about the visible.

In this regard, Lulú insists emphatically on investigating semiotic and metalinguistic aspects of printmaking from the enunciation, questioning the legacies of different periods in its History. In this line, if we think about works like Envés or Zig Zag, Lulú combats certain academic postulates of this practice in each of her decisions, bringing to light her lunar, Martian, and warrior fire. Indeed, for Lulú, this dispute is the main motivation (and obstinacy) to continue producing meaning from printmaking. However, and with great eloquence, questioning also operates as a tribute to the practice, which is nourished by the desire to continue in the fight.

Therefore, like an Amazon, Lulú problematizes and reflects on the conditions of existence of printmaking, introducing a series of decisions, conceptual variations, and techniques that point to different categories circumscribed within the field of contemporary art. The giant and self-supporting panels manifest something of "the installation" through a dialogue between construction processes and the space that contains them. In fact, the neologism is not only associated with new concepts or ways of approaching materials in the field of printmaking but also, and especially, with the specific site as an exhibition device, the relationship with another spatiality when producing, and the exchange with other people and projects in a new context. In this line, "Neologística” [Neologistics] is pure present; its decisions are made minute by minute, and its existence is ephemeral but also monumental. It is tension and pleasure, a mantle of contradictions that harmoniously coexist as a way of life that is sustained from within and outside the arts.

María Mines